Crafty Rafters
by Inudaughter Returns
Summary: There is a rafting contest for make-your-own rafts. Gerald and Arnold and their friends enter but end with failed results.
1. Chapter 1

**Here is just a start to the story! I'm making a push to get through as many of my proposed fanfics as possible while I have some time to myself. So here's the next installment!**

One of the more beautiful things about childhood is the vacant expanses of pure time. Perhaps this is part of the reason why a child whining about having nothing to do annoys grown-ups so much. The adults have so much of possessions but the thing they long for most is time- a precious element of their lives which lost in the constant grind of work/sleep/work/sleep/work. Martin Johanssen frowned at Arnold and Gerald as the two boys lay about his stoop like inebriated fish.

"Come on boys!" the man said staring at the two boys who lay prostrate as though they had both lost the use of their spinal columns. "You boys gotta get out and do something! Stop lying around here so I can trip on ya!" the man said. He stooped to get an old newspaper from the corner of his stoop, then carried it into the house with him, slamming the door. Gerald winced.

"Well. We'd better go elsewhere to bum around!" Gerald observed. "Today's Dad's day off and he seems mighty edgy!"

"Tell me about it!" Arnold observed without anger. After all, watching Gerald's father huff and puff was the most fun he'd had all day. But before they could depart for pastures elsewhere, the front door to the house popped open. Martin Johanssen stepped out his front door with a smile. He lifted up a sheet of the newspaper before him.

"Look what I found, boys!" the man said holding up the paper sheet. "They're having a rafting contest tomorrow at City Lake! How about you two boys spend today building a raft! Getting your hands dirty and all that! It'll be good for ya! Builds character!" Arnold and Gerald clustered over the paper sheet to get a quick look at it.

"Hm, alright!" Gerald said rapidly, eager to soothe his father's ire.

"Great! I'll call them up and get you entered right away!" Gerald's father stomped off with a pleased grin. Arnold pouted.

"A boating contest? There goes our weekend off!" he complained.

"Ah, we weren't doing anything anyway!" Gerald explained. "This could be mighty interesting!"

"Well… it might!" Arnold said cheering up once he had reflected on it. He hurried his footsteps to catch up to his friend. "So what will be build it out of?" Gerald paused to examine the newspaper for directions.

"Hm. I have no idea!" the boy said flapping the paper sheet. He handed it off to Arnold for the boy to work a little of his creative genius.


	2. Chapter 2

**I've decided to move this story up in chronological order (quite a bit). It should take place right after "Arnold Goes Bad", largely because it makes more sense if Arnold and Helga aren't especially close yet. I wanted to do a story called "Crafty Rafters" ever since I saw the cover of Arnold and Gerald canoeing on the cover of an old Nickeolodeon magazine. I had to alter their canoe into a homemade raft to make a story out it since I didn't feel like a camping story. The dandelion myth comes out of my own childhood. I spread plenty of them! Please enjoy the rest of the story...**

Arnold pouted. "A boating contest? There goes our weekend off!" he complained.

"Ah, we weren't doing anything anyway!" Gerald explained. "This could be mighty interesting!"

"Well… it might!" Arnold said cheering up once he had reflected on it. He hurried his footsteps to catch up to his friend. "So what will we build it out of?" Gerald paused to examine the newspaper for directions.

"Hm. I have no idea!" the boy said flapping the paper sheet. He handed it off to Arnold for the boy to work a little of his creative genius.

"Let's start by seeing what material we can find!" Arnold humbly stated.

Gerald and Arnold scouted out Arnold's backyard for clutter. There wasn't much there- only an old steel tire rim hidden with the weeds. Arnold dug through the garage, also to look for things. He found only a single old water bottle. He tested it in a small bucket filled with water. It bobbed up and down in an unsteady manner.

"At least it floats! " Arnold said, his eye hugely magnified as it peered through a different bottle still filled to the top with water. He blinked with scientific curiosity. "Or should anyway," the boy said squeezing the empty, but tiny, plastic bottle in one hand. Gerald frowned at Arnold's optimism.

"So we have two pieces of trash! That won't make a raft!"

"No," Arnold said, deep in thought. "But if we get more material…"

"Nah, let's just jump to the chase and go down to the dumps to look for stuff! They MIGHT have something good!" The two boys scurried off as fast as their little legs could go. Their hair whipped backwards in the air drag they created.

Arnold and Gerald had just vaulted past an open gap between fences when Arnold pulled himself up to a stop. Something had caught his eye as he had hurtled past the gap in the fence. It was a bright spot of pink and another of blue. With second thoughts about what he was about to do, Arnold poked his head around the fence board.

Yup! It was Helga alright. Harold was there, too. Both of the kids looked bored out of their wits. Helga had been playing darts all day- the fence beyond was a complete pincushion. But by now, she was bored of that and sulked with her feet propped above her head on an old chair someone had tossed outside into a litter-strewn vacant lot. She inhabited the greener, more weed-strewn corner. Harold was sat down on the ground on an old driveway without the house to go with it, slouched in the dust but unbothered by it. The boy with the blue cap had been playing marbles. They lay in a wide circle all around him. But by this point, he had given up the game, too, to tear apart a dandelion.

"I heard once," Harold said with a slight slur. "That if you can get all the petals off a dandelion at once, you'll be granted whatever wish you could wish for! I'd wish for a million Mr. Nutty bars!" Helga tumbled off her cushion to stomp over to Harold. She snatched the bright yellow dandelion out of his hand.

"Nah! You've got it ALL WRONG Pink-Boy! It's if you BLOW all the FLUFF off a dandelion at once you'll have a wish granted! Here!" said Helga shoving a puffy, white dandelion top into Harold's hand. Eyebrows lowered and scowl in full force, she watched Harold as he puffed and puttered. But only a few off the seeds detached from the dandelion. Harold reached up to scratch his head below his ball cap.

"This is harder than it looks!" he grumbled.

"I know!" Helga said waving a finger at him. "I've tried, hundreds of times! You have to blow EVERY SINGLE ONE of the seeds off all in one shot to succeed! Or you won't get your wish! Which led to a huge dandelion explosion in my backyard. My Dad went nuts!"

"AWWW!" Harold grumbled. Helga smiled a cunning smile.

"Cheer up, Pink-Boy! I've come up with a plan to set them adrift all at once for certain! Watch!" Helga said, her eyes shifted. She plucked up a bit of dandelion top. She waited for a gust of wind to come along, then she tossed the entire flower head into it to drop, not too far away, but enough that it had been carried over the board fence. She grinned, triumphant.

"Are you sure that works?" Harold said with a huge degree of skepticism.

"Hey, we all make our own luck, to a point!" Helga shrugged as Arnold stepped round the fence. Her eyes grew wide as Arnold entered her dandelion patch. She kept silent, her arms lowered to her sides, her eyes flicking up and down Arnold's form.

"Hey, Helga!" Arnold said with a slight, uneasy grin. "Are you and Harold doing anything?" Helga shifted her eyes suddenly towards the blue-hatted boy. She crossed her arms and huffed.

"Nah, off course not! We aren't doing anything! It's dullsville today! So how about you? What are you and Geraldo doing for kicks?"

"Actually, Gerald and I are entering a boating contest tomorrow. I was wondering if you'd heard about it, too. You could come and watch!"

"Watch? Lemme see that Football-Brains!" Helga said snatching the newsprint Arnold was holding up from his hand to read it. Her eyes scooted nimbly down the the page. Momentarily, she handed the newspaper clipping back to Arnold.

"Ha! Harold and I will make a raft, too! How about that?"

"Sounds… great," Arnold uttered with attempt to be polite. He might have been flattered if Helga had gone to the competition to cheer him on. But it was true to her way to try to be a rival instead.

"Well, I'll see you later!" Arnold said trying to extricate himself from the mess he had gotten himself into. But Helga pumped her arms and caught up to him as he turned. Arnold's eyes widened as Helga suddenly strode alongside of his shoulder instead of staying in the vacant lot where he had found her.

"We'll come, too!" Helga decided on the authority of Helga. She followed Arnold to Gerald. The boy had been waiting on the corner with an annoyed expression.

But any awkward feelings were forgotten as the four friends arrived at the dump. There was so much to go through. They wandered the edges of a not-so-safe place to be. But there were some large items stacked into piles. One of these stacks was plastic. Helga found two plastic drums in these. It was too bad Helga had spotted them first! They were a good find. But Arnold narrowed his eyes in concentration. He'd after to look harder for something to keep their raft afloat. At last, his eyes widened. He had spotted four truck inner tires leant up against a shed wall. He rolled one of them out for Gerald to see.

"Let's get to work!" the boy said with a smile.

It took all morning for them to sneak away with all the things with the things they needed and arrange them in Arnold's backyard under the interpass. The sun kept shifting further and further, showing the advance of afternoon as they actually assembled their raft from a crazy assemblage of rubbish. The floating base of their raft was tires and pallets, but one of the rails was a bedpost. Gerald had fixed a rooster sculpture on one of the corners of their craft. For shade, they made a little canopy out of a crazy-ugly tablecloth. For extra adornment, they added paper pennant flags that were relics of old, forgotten sports games. They had to borrow real paddles for their craft.

"Well, we did it!" Gerald said giving his best friend a friendly slap on the back. "I don't know if she floats, but we did it!"

"Yeah! We'll try it out tomorrow!" Arnold said. A smug, weary, but content smile filtered across his face. They did their best-friends-thumb shake-thing.

Arnold was a little surprised when, in the morning, the contest's latest entry was Helga and Harold. The two had cobbled together a basic craft on large plastic drums. Mysteriously, the swan's head that Gerald and Arnold had snapped off the swan boat when they went after Big Caesar was on the brow of their girly boat. Only now it had little crosses where the eyes should be. Harold muttered negatively as he paddled. The boat was rather girly painted in pink. Not like Arnold and Gerald's red and blue. But the biggest surprise of all was Phoebe. She stood on the brow with a little sailor's cap on her head.

"All right. Skipper! Present yourself!" Helga said to her friend as Phoebe saluted. Harold kept paddling.

"Oh! Good morning, Gerald! Good morning, Arnold!" Phoebe said battering her eyes at Gerald Johanssen. He admired the girl back.

"Yeah, yeah!" Helga said interrupting the nauseating intimacy between those two. Especially if she wasn't getting any. "Oarsman! Row!" she yelped.

"Hey! You help, too, Helga!" Harold griped.

"Alright, alright!" Helga complained back. She took up the second oar and sat down to row. Smiling at her rare good fortune, Phoebe took the craft's best, center chair.

"Well," said Arnold standing up on his feet to get the best look possible of his friends. He wore, like all the others, an orange life-vest around his torso. "Good luck!"

"You, too, Arnoldo," Helga said, annunciating the boy's name slowly as if there was something more she wished to say. Safe journey? Come home safe to me? Stay within my sight? Give me as much attention as Gerald give Phoebe? It was impossible to tell. Arnold could only tell that the girl was hesitant to turn her attention to the race instead of him. Their eyes broke contact- the break was reluctant for both of them.

But the race was on! And so, with the buzz of the air horn, a lot of boats were off! The better boats were made by grown-ups. Some of their neighbors sailed by rapidly. Even Grandma Pookie was there but Arnold didn't see her flash past him on the far side of the crowd. She hadn't said anything about the race to him! Sid was there on a boat steered by his father.

Last to set off and slowest in the race were Gerald and Arnold's boat and Helga and Harold's boat with Phoebe at the helm. She looked through a periscope into the horizon. But the kids did manage to move their boats even if they were slow about it. They managed to straggle behind the main group. Their crafts kept side by side. It looked as if they might be able to complete the route until Gerald heard a loud, chomp! Then he pulled his paddle free of the water's surface to look at it. A big bite had been taken out of the paddle.

"Huh?!" the boy muttered as a large beaver popped up beside his boat. It leered back at him. Helga and Harold's boat slowed to a stop. Helga was staring at the same thing Gerald was. But Harold began to laugh.

"Ha, ha!" the boy chortled. "Look at you! You're so…"

"Harold, look out!" Helga barked. She grit her teeth. Harold had continued his paddling so that they ran straight into a large rock. Their ship cracked cleanly in half.

"Argggh!" the three kids cried trying to scramble for higher ground. Ever the clever one, Phoebe leapt into Gerald's lap on the boat nearest to them. Helga scrambled for their boat, too. She gave Arnold a chagrined smile as she wedged in next to him on the small craft. But everybody's eyes got wide when Harold flopped down on the boat. It dipped low into the water but mercifully it didn't sink.

"Too much ballast! Too much ballast!" Gerald griped as waves sloshed over the edge of the boat.

"I think we can make it back to shore!" Arnold said lowering his brows with determination. He began to paddle furiously. But all of a sudden, another chomp was heard. This time, Arnold's paddle completely vanished from his hands. The culprit was another beaver a few yards off. It held Arnold's paddle in his jaw until it completely devoured it into sawdust.

"If I didn't know better, I'd say that beaver has it out for us!" Gerald griped at the beaver. Desperate, all the kids leant over to the water to paddle with their arms and hands. They reached a larger rock island to land their craft against. Phoebe stayed on the ship, but Arnold, Gerald, and Helga piled off the craft onto the rock to climb to its precipice. From there, they could see the shoreline. But they couldn't stay there for long.

"So what now?" Helga asked Arnold. "Do we swim for it?"

"In the dirtiest lake around?" Gerald grimaced as he spotted all the floating rubbish which bobbed around their "island".

"Gerald does have a point, you know. Our craft is kind of dinky. But at least we won't get wet!"

Arnold might have rumpled his eye up at Helga's presumption that the craft had suddenly become communal property. But he studied the landscape around him instead.

"Hold on!" Arnold said. He plucked a water jug out of the water, then took some twine out of his pocket. He wrapped one soda bottle with twine, then lashed it to a second. Then another.

"Arnold... What are you doing?" Gerald asked.

"You'll see! You guys look around for something we can use for a paddle!" They did as asked.

Not too long later, Arnold had made a little craft out of the soda bottles and tied it to the rear of their boat. That way they could tow Harold along behind them without sinking low in the water. The other kids had found old signs to use for paddles. They hopped onto their ship with a grin. They were all determined to get to shore. When at last their little boat slid onto the ground, Helga hopped off the boat and swung her arms high over her head.

"Oh, sweet terraria!" Helga said before kissing the ground. She got up off her knees and grinned at Arnold.

"Arnold, you're a genius!" Gerald said. "But next time maybe we all better work on our craft together! Might work out better that way."

"Tah! Maybe it wouldn't have!" Helga complained, taking Gerald's speech for a slight. "But we made a good team!" Helga grinned but stopped short of shaking anyone's hand. She kept her hand tucked away instead.

"Well, none of us even finished the course for the contest!" Arnold remarked, his face taking on a touch of melancholy. Helga watched him grow glum with a stab of remorse to her heart.

"Ah, don't worry about it so much, Arnoldo!" she said trying to distract him from his woes as Gerald did. "We all got a chance to go boating, which is enough, right?!"

"Yeah, and next time we'll build a better boat!" Gerald nodded. Helga and him had come to an unspoken peace by both looking after Arnold (in their own way).

"Yeah!" Arnold agreed. It sounded like a good bargain to him so he initiated a friendship thumb shake to clinch the deal. Gerald grinned.

"Look. I gotta catch up with my Dad. You coming?"

"Yeah!" Arnold nodded. All of the kids flocked to the shoreline where the boat racers had parked their cars. People were celebrating their victories and mourning their defeats.

"There you all are!" Gerald's father said with heart. "I thought I was going to have to send the coastguard out after you!"

"We're alright, Dad!" Gerald said placatingly. "And I guess we had fun. After a fashion. Better than seeing how long I can keep a grass stem in my teeth."

"Well," said Gerald's Dad looking around at the crowd of kids. He looked in his wallet. "How about I take you kids all out to lunch?"

"Yeah!" they all cheered. They waved their hands above their heads.

"I'd like a basket of clamstrips!" Phoebe said catching up to Gerald. She tucked her arm into his.

"Now it won't be expensive!" Martin Johanssen warned at hearing Phoebe's remark. "It's gotta be cheap!"

"AWW!" the crowd booed. But they smiled as Gerald's father shooed them along on their way like a little herd of goats. The end.


End file.
